Politics of Somatic Architecture – proposes a performative investigation culminating in a series of discursive experimental conversations in a performative setting.
The project investigates heterotopic architectural elements that shape, define and/or provoke the configuration of closeness and distance.
Throughout the beginning of 2020 months, the shared pandemic reality has led to a series of necessary heterotopic elements, that propose a somatic engagement with the architectures we inhabit daily. Whether it is the plexiglass in front of cashiers, new taped line systems, compartmentalized quick test stations, or barrier labyrinths at train stations and airport halls, we are interacting with a series of architectural elements as precaution of human fluids. Alongside these interventions we find ourselves within new performative interdependencies between architecture and the social body.
From a queer perspective, Politics of Somatic Architecture aims to investigate how architecture can turn into an incorporated experience, that can both shape the social body or be reshaped by it.
HOW CAN WE BECOME CO-AGENTS THAT HOLD QUEER SPACES FOR CLOSENESS WITHIN THE NECESSARY PHYSICAL DISTANCE?
The research of PoSA led to the foundation of NOGOODS and the its first public programme consisting of performances, lecture screenings, workshops and installations from local and international artists.
Saturday 9. April 2021 – Soft Opening
Introduction to space and performative research project (PoSA)
As a project space dedicated to performative research and social engagement, we collectively opened the space, by hosting each other. Planting seeds, glazing cakes, mixing drinks – how can we share agency over a space, we are just recently discovering?
Friday 24. June 2021
Politics of Somatic Architecture – table writing workshop
with Maike Statz
The table writing workshop will invite participants to respond to a series of writing prompts, focusing on kitchen and dining tables, memory, materiality, situatedness and experience of space. Practices of assemblage, auto-theory and site-writing will be shared and explored collectively. Maike has also designed the tables for NOGOODS which will be the material supports for the workshop.
COLLAPSE: Politics of Somatic Architectures
Series of Online Lectures, Dinner & Conversations
With limited resources during the COVID-19 pandemic, the first series of Collapse was curated related to the ongoing research of “Politics of Somatic Architecture” selection of lectures. In a dinner setting, the lectures were screened, and discussed together.
Tuesday 19. April 2022
Entanglements. Hélène Frichot and Naomi Stead in conversation with Michael Young: ‘Writing Within and Without Architecture’ from The Cooper Union Arch Archive, 2020 -> LINK to Lecture
Tuesday 26. April 2022
Paul B. Preciado: ‘Benno Premsela Lecture’ from Het Nieuwe Instituut 2017 ->LINK to Lecture
Tuesday 10. May 2022
Simona Castricum: ‘When Program Is the Enemy of Function’ live recording from ‘Architecture & Feminisms’ conference at KTH Stockholm in 2017 -> Link to Performance
Tuesday 7. June 2022
Dr. Bonaventure Soh Beheng Nidkung: ’Who cares about care, if care is the alibi? (A lamentation in three fragments, and seven songs.) Care, Caring and Repair in Cognitiv Capitalism’ from the SAAS Summer Institute of Art, 2020 -> LINK to Programme
Work-in-Progress Residencies
The work in progress residencies invited local artists to join NOGOODS for a period of 10-14 days to work on a project(s) that is currently under development. At the end of the residency, their work-in-progress was presented in different performative formats.
25.042022 -6.05.22
Anthony Morton – ‘A Place of Shade’
18h Thursday 5th May
Performative Process sharing and Feedback session around Anthony’s project.
The Place of Shade is an exhibition of artistic research into contemporary Norwegian culture in South Africa. Norwegians, began operating within the British colonial framework from around 1840—the same period as the migration to America. Lutheran missions, whaling, farming, business and family characterise this almost 200 year Afri-Norge diasporic heritage.
The project is an act of psychogeography, insofar as it hinges upon ‘the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals.’ The images, paintings, film and text that make up the exhibition are the culmination of this process.
Anthony Morton (b. Durban, South Africa), is a visual artist and researcher based in Bergen, Norway. During the residency at NOGOODS he worked on an artistic research project called The Place of Shade. It seeks to visualise what is contemporary in the wake of Norwegians operating within the British colonial framework of South Africa. It explores how perception is affected by a longing for home in the Afri-Norge diaspora.
